Senegal Elects Ousted PM As Parliament Speaker

Ousmane Sonko, dismissed as Senegal’s prime minister four days ago by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, was on Tuesday elected Speaker of the National Assembly.

Sonko received 132 votes with no member voting against him and one abstaining, in a parliamentary session boycotted entirely by the opposition, where he was the sole candidate for the position.

The path to the speakership was cleared on Sunday when the previous speaker, El Malick Ndiaye, a Sonko ally, resigned, with deputies subsequently summoned to a full session of the assembly on Tuesday morning to reinstate Sonko as a lawmaker and vote for a new speaker.

Opposition leader Aissata Tall Sall denounced the development as an “institutional coup,” arguing that Sonko, in order to become a lawmaker again, should first have resigned as prime minister before returning to parliament.

Sonko remains the undisputed leader of Pastef, the party which controls 130 of the 165 seats in Senegal’s National Assembly.

Faye fired Sonko on Friday and dissolved the government following months of tensions between the two men. The two had fallen out over how to manage Senegal’s debt crisis, with Faye pushing for a new agreement with the International Monetary Fund while Sonko favoured a sovereigntist approach that resists dependence on international lenders.

The IMF had frozen a $1.8bn lending programme following the discovery of misreported debt hidden by the previous government, pushing the country’s end-2024 debt level to 132 percent of its economic output.

Faye appointed Sonko prime minister in April 2024 after winning the presidential election the previous month, with Faye essentially owing his position to Sonko, his one-time mentor who would almost certainly have taken the top job had he not been barred from the presidential election due to a defamation conviction.

Faye on Monday named Ahmadou Al Aminou, a former regional central bank official, as the new prime minister. Last month, politicians overwhelmingly approved electoral code changes that could pave the way for Sonko to run for president in 2029.